We Love Lucy’s

April 30, 2018 | Posted by Peter Jakobsen | FOOD, Restaurants, TRAVEL |

Lucy’s El Adobe Café, Melrose Avenue, Hollywood We were stuffed. That is, exhausted and footsore. Having walked from Hollywood Blvd; having traversed the entire Hollywood Cemetery; having found that there’s no easy way from there to Paramount Studios except to walk another few miles, even though it is adjacent; having found that there’s virtually nowhere along Melrose to sit and eat, we chanced upon this place with the modest sign and modest exterior, just over the road from Paramount. Our luck was in. This was a great little Cantina, and the signed photos of stars all over the walls bore testimony…

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The Getty Center

April 27, 2018 | Posted by Peter Jakobsen | ART, TRAVEL |

Los Angeles, April 2018 It’s slightly under an hour from Hollywood to John Paul Getty’s multi-pavilioned complex in the hills above Bel Air and Brentwood, but when you arrive, a whole array of art and artefact (some, it is fair to say, makes you wish, to paraphrase Paul Keating about David Roche, he could have put down his scatter-gun) is free. He only employed classicists but we fear, in his collecting, he may not have always consulted them. Some of the eccentricity of Getty’s collecting can be seen in this sequence of busts; genuine Ptolemaic renderings of Alexander, c. 200BC…

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The Little Village

April 26, 2018 | Posted by Lesley Jakobsen | Annabel Lee, ART, CRAFT, TRAVEL |

New York City, April 2018 – The Whitney moved from the upper East side to the charmingly-named meat-packing district, swelling the capacity to display its great stock of American art, but it left behind, over the road, a little piece of pixie masterpiece. The elegant building on 940 Madison Avenue is now an ‘Apple’ store, and nestled in the top right office ledge is a tiny village… This is one of several created by Charles Simonds. “Since 1970 Simonds has created Dwelling places for an imaginary civilization of “Little People” who are migrating through the streets of neighborhoods in cities throughout…

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Paramount

April 24, 2018 | Posted by Peter Jakobsen | FILM, TRAVEL |

"Open up, Jonesey!"

Paramount Studios, Melrose Avenue, Hollywood, April 2018 – TVC decided on something ‘touristy’ – a Hollywood studio tour. Spurning the hordes of kiddies likely to be at Universal, looking at the mangy old “Jaws” shark or the “Psycho” house, we went to venerable, staid old Paramount (producer of the first ‘Best’ Picture under the Academy system, “Wings”), which now incorporates the adjacent old RKO / Desilu studios. Unlike Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard, you leave, rather than enter by the lucky Bronson Gate (not named after Charles Bronson – Bronson, aka Buchinsky, is named after the gate). Built on lemon and orange…

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Hollywood Forever Cemetery

April 23, 2018 | Posted by Peter Jakobsen | FILM, TRAVEL |

For whom the bells toll

Corner of Santa Monica Blvd & Van Ness Ave, Hollywood, April 2018 – The map seems almost impenetrable but still sounder than the map to live stars’ homes – …and Lohengrin predominates – Plus there are turtles… Take it away, Johnny and Dee Dee: The swans, cats, peacocks, squirrels, and human mourners can find, among the “Garden of Eternal Love”, the “Garden of Jerusalem”, the “Plains of Abraham”, “the Pantheon”, the Garden of Beginners” and the “Garden of Legends”, such luminaries as Don Adams, William (“One-Shot”) Beaudine, Harry Cohn (of whom Red Skelton observed, noting the large crowds at his…

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